by Marko Kloos
“Going all in,” Halley says. “There’s beauty in that.” She looks at me quizzically. “You’re looking forward to that fight, aren’t you?”
“What?” I laugh. “Who the fuck looks forward to combat? Other than psychopaths. Or maybe Sergeant Fallon.”
“Come on, now. I know you. You were a bit of a mess before Arcadia. So tense I could practically hear the humming coming from your nerve strands. And now you’re all calm about Mars. Projecting a win, even.”
I shake my head. “I’m not calm about it. And I’m sure as hell not looking forward to it.”
“What is it, then?”
“I’m looking forward to finally being done with it,” I say. “One way or the other. It’s been hanging over our heads for over a year now.”
“One way or the other,” Halley repeats.
We eat in silence for a little while. Halley finishes her soup and methodically scrapes out the little thermal container with her spoon to get every last bit of it.
“Buying it on Mars isn’t my worst fear,” she says. “I don’t want to check out just yet, but I’m not afraid of it.”
“Then what is your worst fear?” I ask.
“Coming back without you,” she says. Then she pops the lid back onto the soup container and puts it back in the bag. I am not used to Halley getting sentimental or mushy on me, and I’m still trying to decide how to respond when she stands up and shoulders our lunch bag.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s see if we can make the top of the next hill before we eat those sandwiches. We’ll be cooped up in a spaceship before too long. Might as well stretch our legs while we can.”
“Might as well,” I agree.
We pack up our little bit of gear and shoulder our packs again. I carefully watch Halley when she puts on her pack and notice that she grimaces a little bit when she slips the straps onto her shoulders, but she looks back at me with determination and nods toward the path.
“After you, Lieutenant.”
“That first part is downhill,” I say. “Speed march, six minutes per kilometer. Let me know when you can’t hack it anymore.”
She grins at this open challenge, as I knew she would.
“The day I tap out of a speed march with a light pack is the day I’ll start folding your laundry for you, Andrew.”
“Oh ho,” I say. “An incentive. Let’s go then, Captain.”
I turn and start trotting down the path, and Halley follows me, a renewed spring in her step. The path to the next little peak only goes on for two kilometers, but right now I wish it would stretch for a thousand.
When you’re embarked on a carrier and heading out for deployment to some backwater colony, and your ship is doing what seems like an interminably long transit to the Alcubierre node, three days seem like an eternity. But here in Vermont, with the knowledge of our impending separation, three days seem like no time at all. We go out into the hills during the days because it’s quiet and there are few other people, and because we won’t be able to see sky and trees again for quite a while. In the evenings, we spend time with my mother and Chief Kopka, having dinner and talking about the things we’ll do after Mars, more to keep my mother’s spirit up than ours. We spend the nights together, of course, upstairs in the chief’s guest bedroom, just the two of us, uninterrupted time without any 1MC announcements or alerts blaring outside our door. In all my time with Halley since we got married on Regulus last year, the three days before our deployment are the most peaceful ones I’ve had since I joined the military.
On the morning of our departure, we wake up early and have breakfast downstairs in the still-dark restaurant while the chief and my mother are conducting their preopening business, making coffee and preparing the menu’s breakfast items. They’re a bit more sparse and a lot more expensive than they used to be the first time I came to this restaurant, but the food is still way beyond anything the military serves, better even than the good stuff we got to eat when I first signed up. We have coffee, scrambled eggs, and bacon, and the chief made us a tall stack of pancakes and decanted some of his diminishing maple syrup reserve. I want to drag this breakfast out forever, but time advances with no regard for my sentiment. We usually clear out and vacate the table before the chief opens his restaurant at seven o’clock so we don’t take up space for paying guests, and we stick to that routine today as well, but not before polishing off the entire stack of pancakes.
It’s just getting light outside when we step out, carrying our alert bags and dressed in freshly laundered CDU fatigues. It’s a Friday morning, and the November air is cold and smells like impending snow. The chief and my mother follow us outside to see us off to the train station for our fifteen-minute ride to Burlington, where we will take separate shuttles to get to our next commands. Halley’s ship is docked at Gateway. I have to hop across the country to get to Coronado on the West Coast before I can come up to Gateway as well. By the time I get there, Halley’s carrier will have already left for the assembly point.
“Godspeed,” Chief Kopka says, and shakes our hands firmly. “Give ’em hell. And watch your six.”
“Affirmative, Chief,” I reply. “Thanks for everything. Keep the heat on for us in the guest bedroom. We’ll be back before you know it.”
“I sincerely hope so. Wish I could go up there with you and stand my post again for a bit.”
“They’ll need you down here if things go to hell on Mars,” I say.
“If you all don’t come back, there won’t be much I can do here.”
“If we don’t come back, you close up shop, load all the food into your truck, and head north until you run out of continent,” Halley tells the chief. “You stay away from the big cities. The Brigades won’t be able to keep a lid on the pot if it all goes south. The Lankies don’t like cold places too much.”
I know that the chief is well aware of the fact that the Lankies’ first order of business during settlement is to scrape any humans off the planet with their nerve-gas pods. If they show up in orbit, they’ll drop those on the cities from up high. Then they’ll land their settler pods and start building terraformers to increase the CO2 content in the atmosphere to levels that are lethal for humans. If we lose the battle, and the Lankies show up uncontested, there will be no place on the planet remote enough where we can escape. But my mother is standing here with us to see us off, and nobody wants to hear that death is inevitable if our dice roll comes up short. So the chief just nods, and we go on pretending that it won’t be the end of all things if this mission fails.
“I know you hate it,” I tell my mother. Mom wipes a tear from her cheek and hugs me tightly, or as much as she can while I’m carrying twenty kilos of kit.
“I know you have to do this,” she says. “I know what’s at stake. And I’m proud of you for what you’re doing. But yes, I hate every damn minute of it when you’re gone. Mother’s prerogative.”
“I can’t argue with that, Mom.” I kiss her on the top of her head—she seems so small now—and return her hug. I look at Chief Kopka over the top of Mom’s head, and he nods. I know that if things don’t go well for us, he’ll take care of my mother until the last, and I know that he’ll do what needs to be done to spare them both a drawn-out, agonizing death at the hands of the Lankies. In any case, she’ll be much better off here with the chief than she would have been in the PRC, which will turn into the ninth circle of hell once the Lankies show up in force.
Mom hugs Halley, too, every bit as fiercely as she hugged me, and maybe even a few moments longer.
“Come back, the both of you,” she says. “Do what you have to, and come home. You two have a life to live when this is all over.”
We make the short walk to the train station in the cold morning air, in no particular hurry to get where we are going. We have to report to our new posts by the end of the day, and we’ll easily get there long before the deadline, even if we wait until noon to hop our flights.
As we walk up to the main entrance
of the maglev station, a few snowflakes fall from the sky. They descend leisurely, buffeted by the cold morning wind. I look up at the gray sky and see more flakes drifting down, a first harbinger of the winter that’s about to come. I came to Liberty Falls for the first time on a winter day almost two years ago, and I’ll always see it in my mind with a blanket of clean snow covering the lawns and sidewalks, sparkling in the streetlights, making the town look like a relic from a long-gone time to someone from the PRCs. Maybe this isn’t reality—it certainly isn’t for any of the people I grew up with. But is it so bad to want to live like this instead of living out life in a stack of concrete boxes a hundred floors high?
Halley tries to chase down a snowflake with her tongue but misses. She catches the flake with the back of her hand instead and watches it melt on her warm skin. Then she looks over at me and smiles coyly, like I’ve just caught her doing something childish.
“Four weeks until Christmas,” she says. “Let’s not miss it. It’s my favorite time of the year down here.”
I don’t know what exactly it is about this moment that suddenly makes my heart hurt, and the pain I feel is far worse than the physical wounds I’ve collected in the service, because I know that there are no trauma packs for it. And I know that if I come back here without Halley, I’ll be broken in ways that no military surgeon will be able to fix.
The fifteen-minute train ride to Burlington feels like no time at all.
After so many years of separate deployments, Halley and I have a lot of practice saying good-bye. We both have dangerous jobs, so it makes no sense for this good-bye to feel any different, but it does. We check in at the gate together and climb into the same bus for the ride to the airfield. Ten minutes later, we’re in front of the air station’s ops center, where we will split up to catch our respective rides—hers straight up into orbit to Gateway, and mine to the other coast.
Halley kisses me and fixes the stand-up collar of my CDU fatigues, even though I know it needs no fixing.
“This is it,” she says. “The Big One. Are you nervous?”
“No,” I lie.
“Me, neither,” she lies right back.
“We’ll still be able to talk on MilNet. Unless they black out near-field comms, which they won’t. At least not until we’re out of the assembly area and well on the way to Mars.”
“So write,” she says. “Maybe we’ll even have the bandwidth for video.”
“Thank you for standing up for me back in San Antonio. Against your folks, I mean.”
Halley pulls me close for another kiss, ignoring the gaggle of enlisted personnel milling around nearby who are eyeing the two Fleet officers playing kissy-face.
“You are my folks now. They’re my parents, but you’re my husband. I’ll always take your side. Without blinking. Never doubt that.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I say.
“I love you,” she says. “I always will, even when I’m back to being stardust.” Then she kisses me one more time and shoulders her alert bag.
“Let’s get this over with. Do your thing, and come back in one piece. You heard your mom. We have a life to live. And those spindly fucks are standing in the way of that.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
I watch her as she walks out to the shuttle pad to catch her ride into orbit. My wife, the only constant thing in my life since I joined the military, and probably the best drop-ship pilot in the fleet. She has always known her course, and she has never failed to steer it. We’ve had the talk about death many times over the years. Not once did she say that she was scared of dying, and not once did I fail to feel gratitude for someone like her wanting to share her life with me. If I get nothing else in this life, I got that at least, and it’s enough.
“Let’s get this over with,” I repeat. Then I pick up my own alert bag and walk over to the atmospheric shuttle pad to board my own ride.
CHAPTER 9
GETTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER
When we first encountered the Lankies, our military bureaucracy kicked R & D into high gear to come up with weapons and gear to fight the new threat. In typical bureaucratic fashion, even high gear took a few years to produce the first usable prototypes, and the new stuff was hit or miss. But one thing they definitely got right from the start was the new anti-Lanky battle armor. In the supply chain and in official documentation, it’s called the HEBA: hostile environment battle armor. The troops—those lucky enough to get issued one—call it the bug suit.
When I got my last bug suit, it took six days to get me fitted for one. The bug suits aren’t off-the-rack items. They have to be tailored to the user. In the almost five years since I got my suit, they’ve streamlined the fitting process down to a day. It’s still a day of mostly standing around while laser sensors map out every square millimeter of your body, but it beats the laborious hand-measured fitting process from half a decade ago. On Friday, six hours after I say good-bye to Halley at Burlington, I report to Joint Base Coronado, the main Fleet base on the West Coast and home to the fleet’s Special Operations Command. I spend the whole Saturday getting laser-measured and hooked up to various diagnostic systems, and the fitted suit is ready for me by Sunday afternoon.
“That took no time at all,” I say to the supply specialist when I put on the suit for the postfitting testing and calibration. “Last time they didn’t have the suit ready for a week.”
“What happened to it?” the tech asks.
“Burned up with Manitoba at Sirius A.”
“Wow. You were there? Not too many guys came back from that one.”
“No, they didn’t,” I say.
“Yeah, we have way more suits than people who are qualified to wear them,” the tech says. “We fitted more this week than we did all year, but you’re only number seven.”
“I feel special.”
“Hell, they should let us give you a spare suit while you’re here. Just in case this one burns up, too.”
I chuckle without much humor. “If this suit burns up, I don’t think I’ll be needing a spare.”
On Sunday evening, I get onto a shuttle to Gateway Station, where my next command is docked right now. It’s obvious that a big operation is about to kick off—the shuttle is full to the last seat with passengers bound for orbit, and when I step out of the shuttle and onto the station an hour later, Gateway is as busy as I’ve ever seen it. The main concourse is crammed with throngs of uniformed personnel streaming in both directions. I can’t help but notice how green most of them are. I see lots of junior enlisted, privates and PFCs and corporals, and damn few sergeants or officers. This is the last batch of trainees we ran through the cycle just before Mars. I wonder how many former recruits from boot-camp platoon 1526 are somewhere in the crowd, rushing off to their assigned commands, nervous enough to throw up. Depending on their occupational specialties, many of them had just enough time to squeak through tech school in time to be part of this offensive.
It takes half an hour at a brisk jog to traverse Gateway’s main concourse from one end to the other when the station isn’t packed to the bulkheads. Overcrowded as the concourse is right now, it takes me over an hour of drifting with the crowds until I reach the part of the station where my new command is docked. It’s in the capital-ship section of Gateway, and the big screen next to the airlock displays the ship’s name and hull number, along with other information.
“NACS PHALANX CA-761,” it reads. “CO: COL YAMIN, S.”
I remember Phalanx. She’s one of the most advanced ships in the fleet, a heavy space control cruiser with enough firepower to take on an SRA task force by itself. She was also one of the ships the renegades stole and shuttled to the Leonidas system, to safeguard their little paradise with the best hardware the fleet had left. When the former NAC leadership on Arcadia surrendered, we reclaimed almost every ship from the stolen task force to pad our roster for the Mars assault. When we left the system, all they had left at their orbital anchorage was an older frigate fo
r patrol duties. Phalanx and the rest of the renegade fleet rejoined the NAC forces in the solar system a week later. The ships are still mostly run by the renegade crews because we don’t have the manpower to replace all those well-trained specialists, but everybody who wasn’t part of the Exodus is keeping a close eye on everybody who was.
The airlock is guarded by two SI troopers, a private and a sergeant. The private looks like he just got out of SI training last week, but the sergeant seems to have been around the block a time or two. Her name tape says “BULL, S.,” and she wears a no-nonsense expression to go with the sidearm on her belt. The drop badge above her left breast pocket is stitched in silver thread—more than twenty drops, less than fifty. I dig out my PDP and show her my orders. She scans it and verifies the data on her own PDP.
“You’re looking for Delta Deck, sir,” she says. “Section Forty-Seven, Grunt Country. Have you been on a Hammerhead before?”
“A few times,” I say.
“We have the near-field network activated. Just follow your PDP’s directions.”
“Will do. Thank you, Sergeant.”
I step through the hatch, across the docking collar, and onto NACS Phalanx. My PDP’s haptic engine bumps my palm gently to direct me down the passageway ahead. Phalanx is as modern as Fleet ships come, and the ship’s nonslip passageway liner looks almost pristine, not worn down to the laminate deck like the ones on long-serving units. Everything looks like the ship just came out of the builder’s dock last year, and for all I know, that may be the case. It’s only when I get deeper into the ship, following my PDP’s directions down ladders and along fore-and-aft passageways, that I see some signs of prior battle damage, expertly but obviously patched holes and faint scorch marks on bulkheads and decks. I’ve seen such damage before, and I conclude that Phalanx has come too close to Lanky seed ships or proximity mines before.
